2018
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A rock or a soft place?
a whole. We don’t need to be nancially incentivized to do that;
it’s our human nature.
Downtown Calcutta firms
By now, there is no denying it anymore, and I’d better admit
it: I have a love–hate relationship with organizations. On the
one hand, they’re fantastic, and they produce things that no
individual could have produced by himself, such as airplanes,
open-heart surgery, and skyscrapers. However, on the other
hand, they can be incredibly stupid. British Gas, which sends 28
letters and three bailiffs for a £100 bill despite having received
evidence on multiple occasions that the meter is your neigh-
bor’s (as you may gather, this is not a hypothetical example!),
Firestone, which continues to invest in bias tires while the
whole world (including their own employees) understands radial
technology is the future, and Ahold, which continues to make
acquisitions although even the most junior employee is starting
to suspect things are getting out of hand.
Yet, the thing that I dislike most about large rms is that so
many of my (very well-educated and intrinsically motivated)
friends seriously dislike going to work on a Monday morning –
because, despite the façade, corporate life is dull, repetitive and
unexciting. I also think this is probably the clearest symptom
that organizations are not making sufcient use of the potential
of what is likely to be their most valuable resource: people.
But many large organizations would like to be more entrepre-
neurial and vibrant. And therefore, they send their employees
on training programs and culture courses, in which they build
sandcastles together, climb poles, play drums, or go line-dancing,
to develop some positive team spirit, and provide them with
entrepreneurial energy and creativity.
My favourite anecdote regarding this issue comes from my late
and great colleague Sumantra Ghoshal, who used to tell execu-
tives that every year in August, during his children’s summer
holiday, he would take them to his native Calcutta for a month.
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